Does the horse fly?
Go through Muybridge’s photos and click on the one where the horse has all four hooves off the ground.
The experiment starts as soon as the page has loaded (JavaScript is required).
Try the experiment: your result will appear here, next to what most people do.
What just happened (read it after the experiment)
What most people do: Many people look for the horse with its legs stretched out, as in the paintings.
Yes, the horse flies, but not the way painters imagined. Its four hooves leave the ground when its legs are tucked under its belly, not stretched out forward and back as in Géricault’s The 1821 Derby at Epsom.
In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge lined up twelve cameras along a track, triggered by threads as the horse went by. His pictures, shown in sequence, foreshadowed cinema.
The human eye is too slow to see what photography revealed.
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Sources
- Eadweard Muybridge, The Horse in Motion, 1878.